Roy, David

Professor

Office Phone Number:

605-688-5352

Email:

david.roy@sdstate.edu

David Roy is an SDSU adjunct professor and was a founding professor of the Geospatial Sciences Center of Excellence.

He is a professor at Michigan State University, Department of Geography, Environment, & Spatial Sciences, and at the Center for Global Change and Earth Observations (http://geo.msu.edu/people/roy-david/)

He has research interests that include the development of remote sensing and advanced computing methods to integrate/fuse satellite sensor data and to map and characterize terrestrial change, Petabyte volume satellite data processing, and the causes and consequences of land cover and land use change.

Recent Ph.D.

Dr. Amadou Dieye, Land cover land use change and soil organic carbon under climate variability in the semi-arid West African Sahel (1960-2050) [Funded by 2008 NASA Earth and Space Science Fellowship, Ph.D. April 2016].

Dr. Emma White, Changing field sizes of the Conterminous United States, a decennial assessment [Funded by 2010 GSCE Graduate Research Assistantship, Ph.D. November 2015].

Dr. Chris Barnes, United States land cover land use change, albedo and radiative forcing: past and potential climate implications [Funded by 2007 NASA Earth and Space Science Fellowship, Ph.D. November 2010].

Recent Masters

Sam Cooper, Geography Masters Degree, Examination of the potential of Terrestrial Laser Scanning and Structure-from-Motion photogrammetry for rapid nondestructive field measurement of grass biomass, [Funded by GSCE Graduate Research Assistantship, Masters May 2017].

Active Grants

Roy, D.P. (Principal Investigator), Yan, L., Zhang, H.K., Pathfinding near real time moderate resolution land surface monitoring, looking forward to an operational Landsat 9/10 Sentinel 2A/2B era, This proposal solicits membership to the Landsat Science Team for Dr. Roy and his team who have a proven capability in assessing, processing and developing products from Landsat and Sentinel-2 data. They will: (1) develop Landsat and Sentinel-2 processing, involving assessment and development of algorithms and development of Sentinel-2 ARD comparable to the Landsat ARD, and reflectance correction to nadir BRDF-adjusted reflectance (NBAR); (2) undertake quality assessment and characterization of the consistency of the Landsat and Sentinel-2 ARD; (3) investigate the utility of the data to develop annual land cover products using the state of the art non-parametric supervised classification approaches; (4) investigate the utility of the data to develop timely land cover mapping within the growing season and near-real time (NRT) change detection; (5) assess the expansion of tasks #1-4 to global scale, including making recommendations concerning the development of a global ARD, (6) through these integrative activities make informed recommendations for and provide feedback on planned Landsat-10 observational capabilities. This 5 year contract is funded by U.S. Department of Interior, U.S. Geological Survey, Solicitation G17PS00256.

Roy, D.P. (Principal Investigator), Boschetti, L, Prototyping a Landsat-8 Sentinel-2 Global Burned Area Product. This proposal will prototype a global burned area product by combination of NASA-USGS Landsat-8, ESA Sentinel-2A, and ESA Sentinel-2B data and is directly responsive to the primary focus of the call - developing algorithms and prototyping products for combined use of data from Landsat-8 and Sentinel-2 toward global land monitoring, and advances the virtual constellation paradigm for mid-resolution land imaging. Product validation will be conducted by comparison with visually interpreted commercial high resolution data and will be endorsed by a regional network of African fire scientists and practitioners. The product will be compared with coarser resolution MODIS and VIIRS burned area products, and ESA funded burned area products, to assess product differences and at the validation sites to quantify their relative accuracies. This 3 year project is funded by NASA NNH14ZDA001N Land Cover/Land Use Change (LCLUC14-2): Multi-Source Land Imaging Science.

Roy, D.P (Principal Investigator), Nemani R., Hansen, M.C., Global Long-Term Multi-Sensor Web-Enabled Landsat Data Record. This new MEaSUREs proposal will (1) extend the CONUS and Alaska WELD Earth System Data Record back to 1982 when the first Landsat 30m data started to be acquired and (2) expand the WELD processing to global scale to provide Landsat 30m information for any terrestrial non-Antarctic location for six 3-year epochs spaced every 5 years from 1985 to 2010. Specifically, in collaboration with researchers at NASA AMES and the University of Maryland, the following combined multi-sensor (Landsat 4, 5 TM and 7 ETM+) 30m products will be generated: 1. Weekly, monthly, seasonal and annual products, CONUS and Alaska, 1982 to 2012, defined in the current WELD product Albers projection, generated at the PI's institution; 2. Annual percent land cover and 5-year land cover change products, CONUS, 1985 to 2010, Albers projection, generated at the PI's institution; 3. Monthly global products, for six epochs (1985, 1990, 1995, 2000, 2005, 2010), 36 months per epoch, defined in the MODIS Sinusoidal projection, generated on the NASA Earth Exchange (NEX) supercomputer at NASA AMES; and 4. Global percent land cover and change for each 36 month epoch (1985, 1990, 1995, 2000, 2005, 2010), MODIS Sinusoidal projection, generated on USGS global 30m land cover initiative hardware at the USGS EROS. This proposal directly supports the moderate global spatial resolution data needs of the climate and global change science communities and the needs of the applications community. This 5 year project is funded by NASA NNH12ZDA001N Making Earth System data records for Use in Research Environments (MEASURES).

Giglio, L. (Principal Investigator at University of Maryland), Boschetti, L., Schroder, W., Roy, D.P., Justice, C., Csiszar, I., MODIS Global Active Fire and Burned Area Product Maintenance and Validation, Data from the NASA MODIS Terra and Aqua satellites are being applied to the systematic mapping of fire; the MODIS Collection 6 Global Active Fire product (MOD14/MYD14) and Global Burned Area product (MCD45) provide a first generation multiyear data record for both research and applications from NASA’s Earth Observing System. This modestly priced 4 year proposal offers major savings by combining the maintenance of the two separate (but related) MODIS fire products into a single effort. Funded by NASA NNH13ZDA001N-TERAQEA Terra and Aqua – Algorithms – Existing Data Products.

This course provides an overview and understanding of the technology, techniques and capabilities for remote sensing of the environment, through an investigation of the basic concepts of remote sensing and electromagnetic energy, interpretation of remotely sensed imagery, and key remote sensing applications.

This course describes the science, algorithms, and computational approaches to generate and assess derived satellite products for long term Earth system monitoring. Emphasis is on the principles of optical remote sensing (400 to 1400 nm) and state-of-the-practice quantitative algorithms for estimating biophysical and geophysical land surface variables from remotely sensed observations. The course provides insights into how space agencies, and in particular NASA, goes about these tasks. Understanding of the fundamental principles of remote sensing, physics, calculus, statistics, and computer literacy is required.

Annual WELD 30m Landsat 7 ETM+ mosaic of the conterminous USA (CONUS). Ten years of WELD Landsat satellite data products are freely available for the CONUS and Alaska, providing improved opportunities for the generation of large-area, long-term, high spatial resolution data records and for terrestrial analysis and monitoring. Now 1900+ registered users. See http://globalmonitoring.sdstate.edu/projects/weld/

Conterminous United States (CONUS) field extraction. An automated computational methodology to extract cropland fields from WELD processed Landsat 5 TM and Landsat 7 ETM+ time series was developed. In 2010 for all the CONUS a total of 4,182,777 fields were extracted with mean and median field sizes of 0.193 km2 and 0.278 km2 respectively. Download data and project information.

Fire-affected areas detected using MODIS satellite data within a 650km by 500km region encompassing the southern border of Zambia, the northern border of Zimbabwe, and western borders of Mozambique (borders shown in white). The location and approximate day of burning is mapped over 5 months of the dry season from May 1st (Blue) to October 31st (Red) 2002. Lakes Kariba and Cahora Bassa are shown as grey. See MODIS Fire product site http://modis-fire.umd.edu/pages/BurnedArea.php

Tulbure, M.G., Wimberly, M.C., Roy, D.P., Henebry, G.M., 2011, Spatial and temporal heterogeneity of agricultural fires in the central United States in relation to land cover and land use. Landscape Ecology , 26, 211-224.

Barnes, C.A. and Roy D.P., 2010, Radiative forcing over the conterminous United States due to contemporary land cover land use change and sensitivity to snow and interannual albedo variability, J. Geophys. Res., 115, G04033, doi:10.1029/2010JG001428. ( PDF file, 2.3MB ).